Video Collaboration, everyone’s using it wrong

Recently I conducted a poll on Linkedin, where I asked a simple question.?

What is your primary use case for Video Collaboration?

As head of sales enablement and with 35 years in sales, I think it’s fair to say my LinkedIn community is somewhat biased toward folks in sales. As a result, I was pretty blown away by the fact that nearly three-quarters of respondents chose Internal Meetings. (N=198)

With just 7% stating they use it for sales and 2% for supplier meetings.

Even with a much larger and less skewed sample, it would be fair to say sales have not even begun to embrace video collaboration as the powerful tool it could be.

When I’ve brought this point up this point in the past, many sales leaders tell me that face-to-face communication is what they are familiar with, and it is more effective than video. Certainly, the former is true, but the latter is debatable.

Now, to be clear, I do believe that a true face-to-face meeting is probably better than a single video call. But, consider a number of other factors.?

• How quickly can you get to the meeting? When you’re next in town or in ten minutes?
• How much money do you spend as an organization on Travel & Entertainment?
• How much time of your valuable sales team's time is spent in the car, or plane or simply waiting in reception?
• How many more people can be brought into a video call? Product Manager? Purchasing people? Sales Engineer? The CEO?
• Having sales folks who do not need to travel opens up opportunities for underrepresented groups. Less than 35% of b2b salespeople are women for example.?
• What about the talent wasted because they are not physically mobile enough? Including people with disabilities or those working as caregivers or the elderly. Do we really think it’s acceptable to simply exclude these people from the opportunities to build a career?
• We live in a rapidly aging society, but as someone who spent 30 years “on the road” I know how physically exhausting that is. Video empowers older teams to continue to be “in the game”, allowing companies to not lose some of their best sale people due to burnout.

Over the coming weeks, I plan to put together a series of articles about how we may believe we are all using technology effectively, but in reality, we are falling back into old ways of working because no one has shown what can be achieved with some new thinking.

Over 800,000 people work as business-to-business salespeople in the United States alone. Increasing their productivity by just 10% would make an enormous difference to their lives, their family's lives, their employers, and the economy. I hope you’ll join me in investigating this and would love to hear from you about your own experiences and ideas on this important idea.

Joe Vitalone Scott Wharton Andi Wienold Adam Cox Nathan Coutinho Jonathan Tracey Eric S. Yuan Eric Spadafora Quin Liu Chuck Boynton Prakash Arunkundrum Mike M. Spring Steinbach David Danto Futuresource Consulting Roopam Jain John Steinhauer Julian Phillips Henry Levak Alex Bisset Martin Smith Neil Fluester Kimberly Haymaker TIM KIERNAN AVI Systems 罗技 Poly Neat Wayne N. Driggers Jr. Wayne Mason Wayne McCulloch